During emergencies it is necessary that family and friends stay connected when certain communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. This requires that communication in be as flexible and reliable as possible to keep people connected.
Accessibility to such communication mediums is generally granted via various methods including a desktop software client application, text messaging, email and even voice transmission. Such communications should also be able to gather local news from local and national news sources, and public safety announcements from natural disaster prediction sources, such as, the National Oceanic group and the Atmospheric Administration group.
The user should be able to post status updates to social networks for close friends and family. Reception of such status updates and social network news feeds should be available to let the user see what people are doing, as well as their location on a map if such an application is being shared.
Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone communications and other key communication infrastructures. Failure of electricity and limited accessibility of a person to communicate may also be caused by environmental conditions or personal injuries. Such scenarios usually require at least a working mobile phone or other key communication infrastructure for the user to access in the case of an emergency.
Obviously, a partial lack of access to a key communication infrastructure can be solved by building up a small local area AD-Hoc network where similar network clients may connect to each other as needed, either by cable or via a wireless communication medium.
The military commonly sets up such infrastructures as most of the interest in Ad-Hoc networking has been from the military. Battlefield applications already exist where troops and vehicles are equipped with Ad-Hoc radios. These troops then form a communication network in the ever-changing battlefield environment that is independent from public available communication infrastructure.
Another group of Ad-Hoc networks that is well known from crisis situations has been citizen band radios, which provide efficient simple group voice communication in radio coverage area.
Speech communication in an Ad-Hoc manner for very short connections may be provided by cordless telephones. There are several standards in cordless telephony, both analog and digital. Infrared (IR) connections are widely used in remote controllers, and in peer-to-peer connections between mobile phones, PDA's and laptops. IR provides a simple and easy way to communicate between compatible nodes in very short connections.
For data transmission, remote controls can also utilize a radio connection for example a radio “key” that can be used for a car or a door. Computer keyboards and mice also can be connected via, typically proprietary radios for each application. For speech and data transmission, a Bluetooth radio connection has been developed especially for mobile devices to connect to their short-range environment. Bluetooth is used mainly for single hop connections where devices automatically form a master-slave point to point network. Such networks can be multi-layered so that a slave may operate as a master for other slaves. Communication happens mainly between master and slave. Communication between two slaves happens via common master.
Wireless local area networks also are capable of operating in an Ad-Hoc manner basically with single-hop connections between similar nodes. A typical construction of such a network includes access points that are connected to a network and wireless network interface cards in nodes. This technology supports also peer-to-peer communication mainly for data transfer directly between nodes.
The application market includes such tools as Yahoo's Fire Eagle® service, which, for example, discloses and covers a method to broker location information. It includes functions to share information about a device location with sites, services and other network clients. The method allows transmission and reception of information about a devices location to and from a central platform. Data exchange may be done by various types of devices and operating systems, such as, computers, mobile phones and GPS devices. However, this method presupposes a working accessible connection to a communication infrastructure from the participating device. Initial build up of such a connection based on local available access points or usage of communication methods other than packet oriented network protocols is not provided by such a communication method.
Microsoft's “Vine”® communication platform provides a similar set of functionalities including methods to send alerts and receive reports from a defined group of devices. Communication may include reception of region specific messages and public safety announcements from government officials and transmission of alerts to such authorities. The solution allows the setup of a defined group of devices built from available profiles. To the user, such a group appears as a virtual local area network. Although the application conveys the impression that it provides a safety network in the case of crisis situations, it requires an accessible broadband Internet connection, valid logon information for such a connection, and a personal computer with a manufacturer specific setup. In a real crisis situation, it is unlikely that all such requirements will be satisfied.
The open source messaging client “Lampiro”® effectively creates a “morph” procedure that “morphs” mobile devices into terminals that provide a functionality similar to “thin” clients. The application allows the control of remote peripherals, and through menus and wizards, interaction with applications and services running on a remote server. The application utilizes a manufacturer specific communication protocol that is located on top of the primary communication layer of the device. The application acts as a universal client, which interacts with a remote server. Although the application introduces an additional communication layer that adds extended functionality to the device, an operational access to public communication infrastructure is required which allows usage of the layers functionality.
A method for bridging multiple network segments and exposing the multiple network segments as a single network to higher-level networking software on a bridging computing device, is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,089,335. Although this method discloses a technique that can be used to guarantee a functioning access to public communication infrastructure even if one of multiple network connections fails, it also requires at least one working connection between the involved communication devices.
U.S. published patent application No. 2003/0202494 discloses a method, a system or an apparatus that allows establishment of an Ad-Hoc network utilizing a node and a plurality of nodelets. The application describes a technique to build-up a virtual connection from a first device to a second device, however, due to different communication standards of both devices, direct communication between the devices is not possible. In operation, devices in the vicinity of the first device that comply with the communication standards of the first device may receive and forward data to other nodelets. Although this disclosure discusses building a connection between incompatible devices, at least one accessible device is still needed to initiate the process for building up the connection to the second device.
Both U.S. published patent application No. 2005/0153725 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,879,574 disclose a method that includes a node that acts as a gateway between a backbone access network (e.g. WLAN, cellular, mesh, etc.) and “child” terminals of a corresponding Ad-Hoc cell or subnet. One node acts as a gateway between the nodes within the Ad-Hoc domain and the backbone access network. The node may be elected to be the gateway by the trunk node itself or by a resource management entity. These references provide selecting from available communication layers and switching the active communication layer based on various criteria and rule sets. Although these references already discloses a multi-layer architecture, an initially accessible connection between the devices that form a communication layer is still required.
Patent application publication No. 2007/0230421 discloses a method of operating an Ad-Hoc network that contains a plurality of devices each of which stores information which specifies rules for determining how a device should behave in response to various prevailing circumstances. Instead of building a separate communication layer for each device this method builds-up and maintains a database that contains information about connected devices, their capabilities, settings and performance. Although the ability to remember and exchange logon and routing information between devices makes it possible to share logon profiles that allow access to a public communication infrastructure, the reference does not disclose how this information should be gathered if neither the configuration nor the communication abilities of the target device are known.
A software architecture that provides Ad-Hoc wireless networking capabilities, user and kernel mode modules, and a multiplexing driver framework that enables connection to multiple Ad-Hoc networks is disclosed in patent application publication No. US 2009/0109995. The disclosure describes methods to discover wireless networks and already contains a multi-layer communication architecture which allows simultaneous connections over a single physical adapter and bridging of such connections. The method provides a way to connect a single physical existent network adapter with multiple virtual adapters via a multiplexing driver. Although this method permits bridging multiple concurrently active virtual network adapters using one physical adapter, the newly created low level multiplexing driver requires additional frame headers to function properly.
Another method for performing in an Ad-Hoc network configuration is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,443,833. In this reference, prior to establishing a connection to a node a condition is defined to be associated with such nodes. In case the specified condition occurs, the method utilizes a dedicated, contention free, discovery-communication time period during which each node broadcasts, for reception by all other nodes, its attributes, including its identity, its operating characteristics, its capabilities, and its associated link qualities in relation to the other nodes. The reference utilizes the results of the exchange process to create and make available to all nodes, an overall network topology map associated with the nodes. Although this disclosure shows a way to create a network topology with initially unknown nodes, the method is based on a predefined set of rules that has to be known and obeyed by all potential nodes prior to establishing a connection. In addition, the defined condition limits the result of the discovery process to nodes that meet the condition.
All of the above-noted references disclose networking configurations that provide limited accessibility and/or stringent conditions imposed on the various communication devices operated by the end users. Device connections need to be seamlessly combined with past, current and possible future network infrastructures in order to guarantee service provisioning for end users and to maintain communication in the event of a crisis.